Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (4 page)

After she finished working the front of Selma’s body, Ingrid turned her sister over and did the back. She applied lotion to the papery skin and carefully washed her hair. She knew it was late, but she also knew that she probably wouldn’t sleep tonight anyway.

Once she had done all she could do, she turned Selma onto her back, brushed her teeth, and pulled the sheets and blankets up over her. Then she sat down in the ugly old armchair she had set next to the bed and turned on the television. She and Selma watched a late-night talk show for a while. The host was Scottish, and that made Ingrid think of the trip she and Selma had taken to Europe to visit family in Denmark and to look at castles everywhere else. Selma had developed a crush on a backpacker they met in Munich, a Scottish girl whose accent was nearly indecipherable around her freshly pierced tongue.
Remember that?
she thought at Selma. She used to talk out loud to Selma’s body, but since the ghost had moved in she had decided that the real Selma could hear her thoughts. It was crazy thinking, sure, but crazy was her life.

A news bulletin interrupted the talk show, something about Seoul and a subway. A moment later, Ingrid realized what they were saying, and she turned the volume up.

“—lieved to have foiled an attack of the type known as a Heartstopper. Details are still coming in, but a police spokesman there is saying that they believe they may have discovered the purpose, or at least
a
purpose, behind these attacks, is that correct?”

“That’s right. Seoul police are saying that they discovered an apparatus similar to that used in certain types of demon conjuration, including a vat of what appears to be human fat and blood. Investigators are now saying that they believe the Heartstoppers may be intended not as an attack in and of themselves, but as a mechanism for harvesting the life force of a large number of victims at once, in order to animate what may be a major demon. While this attack has been foiled with a little luck and good police work, this puts the previous attacks in a very different light, since it suggests that, well, I suppose it suggests that they will continue, and that whoever is conjuring these entities may have larger plans.”

Ingrid seized her sister’s hand. All this time she had been thinking of her sister as composed of two parts, the body downstairs, the spirit upstairs. But now she understood that there was a third part. Call it a life force, energy, chi, what have you — it was what she needed to bind the other two together. Except that someone else had taken it and used it to bring a demon into the world.

Selma
, she thought to her sister.
I know how to bring you back. I just need to find a major demon and kill it.

Upstairs, the ghost of her sister began to laugh.

“In premodern alchemy, there were considered to be five principles, or constituent elements. In other words, fundamental substances from which all matter was made. These were salt, sulfur, mercury, water, and earth.”

Zelda Akbulut wrote the list up on the board. “We know now, of course, that these are not really the building blocks of the universe. Not to mention that mercury is both rare and toxic, so its use is discouraged. But the old alchemists were able to accomplish some surprising things with these substances, including one experiment which we will be attempting to reproduce in the lab next week.”

A fortyish man wearing a suit jacket over a turtleneck raised his hand. “So this is something that may show up on exams, yes?”

Zelda scratched at her elbows as she answered. “Anything I write on the board is fair game for the exams. Anything I talk about in lecture — anything we do in lab, anything that comes up in your assigned reading — is something that could be on the exams.

“Now, why are we talking about premodern alchemy at all? Because it’s important to learn how the field has reconceptualized itself over time. In the past seventy years we’ve gone from being seen as chemistry’s senile grandfather to the source of countless innovations in the fields of health, beauty, construction materials, cleaning supplies, and so on.”

Turtleneck Man raised his hand again. “So will we also be learning about the Philosopher’s Stone?”

Zelda folded her arms across her stomach, partly because she was annoyed, but mostly to keep herself from scratching. “Briefly, yes. We won’t be attempting to create one.”

“May I ask why not?” Turtleneck Man had a faint Eastern European accent; Zelda wondered if he commuted to Gooseberry Bluff via portal.

“Because quite apart from the fact that Avicenna convincingly refuted the entire concept, there’s the question of resources. Lead isn’t as cheap as it was before every amateur out there decided that they were going to be the one to discover the fabled stone. Still cheap, sure; so assume the college buys lead for everyone taking this class. Then assume we buy up all the chemicals and other materials that were supposed to have been used in all twelve stages of the creation of the White Stone. Then assume that each of you spends the entire semester doing nothing but trying to recreate the experiments of the ancients. Assume that one of you even succeeds. Amazing! The odds are against it, sure; in fact it’s probably impossible, but never mind about that. One of you has succeeded in finding the secret of creating gold!”

She had their complete attention, some of them for the first time in the entire lecture. So many kids came into alchemy thinking it was the road to easy money; every semester she had to disillusion them of the idea. She’d be lying if she said that there wasn’t a part of her that relished it.

“So let’s assume that you’re able to reproduce your success under even more rigorously controlled conditions. Because you discovered that secret here in class, you would of course be obligated to share your notes with your classmates and myself. Your enrollment gives the college part ownership of this sort of research, so you incorporate in partnership with the school. But the school is also obligated, under the Magical Currency Destabilization Act, to share these types of procedures with the government. And under the same act, private individuals — which includes corporations — are prohibited from the mass production of precious metals. Your best bet would probably be to create limited-edition gold sculptures — some sort of collectible that you can produce in small quantities but price relatively high.

“You could potentially make a decent profit, over time, but you’d never be a millionaire with the Treasury looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. And you’d have competitors, and the price of lead would gradually climb to nearly the price of gold — maybe even higher — and then everyone would start looking for ways to reverse the process.”

Now they looked irritated. Some of them would want to argue with her, she knew, but she had already had that discussion so many times that she wasn’t going to let it start here.

“This is the thing that you all need to learn about magic. People tend to look at it as a shortcut, but the truth is that it’s very often difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, and sometimes — most of the time — you’re better off doing things the old-fashioned way. You’d get more gold, and faster, by walking down to the St. Croix and panning for it.

“Does that answer your question?”

Turtleneck Man nodded…and raised his hand again.

“I’ll tell you what,” Zelda said. “If I answer another question from you right now, it’ll be your last question for the semester. It’s up to you.”

Turtleneck Man put down his hand.

“Good choice.” Zelda checked the clock. “First two chapters in Barnhill for Friday, and no lab this week, but check your sections for next week. You’re dismissed.”

Zelda took her time packing up. A couple of students lingered near the door as if they were waiting to speak to her, but she managed to avoid looking up, and eventually they left. Turtleneck Man was the last one to drift out.

Zelda let out a long sigh and scratched furiously at her elbows. Teaching was usually a good distraction, but the problem was that afterward everything hit her even harder. She calmed herself and hurried out of the room before the next class started to arrive.

Zelda knew that there was one particular area of magic that wasn’t more efficient the old-fashioned way — or rather, it
was
the old-fashioned way, and aside from frivolous lawsuits, no one had come up with a comparable nonmagical alternative. Zelda was under a curse, one that she absolutely deserved, but one that sometimes made her want to just give up.

“May all the good you do turn to bad; may all your help turn to hurt.” It had been twenty-two years, but Zelda could still hear the woman’s voice; she could still see her mouth curled down with rage, her eyes glistening, her tears unshed. In those two decades Zelda had thought of a million responses, and she had learned a dozen counterspells that could have prevented the curse from taking hold. Too late. Too late to change any of it, now. When she tried to take in a stray cat, it drowned in her toilet. She sent money to a wildlife charity, and two months later it was investigated for ivory trafficking. In her first years of teaching, she had tried to mentor certain students, but invariably they ended up dropping out, being arrested, and in one case committing suicide. She was terrified, now, of even being friendly to her students.

Zelda had gone into alchemy because there was no real academic track for cursing; it was a felony, a crime of passion: the kind of magic that you got worse at the more you studied it. She knew, of course, that the only person who could lift a curse was the one who had laid it, but she had no way to find the woman who had done this to her, so she tried to focus on dulling the curse’s effects. Luck — in the form of a powder, potion, or ointment — was
her
Philosopher’s Stone.

Her current case of severe eczema — she felt like the bones of her elbows were trying to emerge from her flaking skin — was the result of a lotion that she had synthesized from powdered amethyst, rose petals, and rabbit saliva. She’d been using it for nearly a month, and she was sure that it was working. She’d let herself get giddy, and the result was the coffee, doughnut, and floor wax concoction that Greg the janitor had mopped out from under Andy’s desk this morning.

Then there was Hector. As if her thoughts had summoned him, she realized that he was walking down the hall in front of her, wearing those tight jeans that she told herself were ridiculous but which she always looked at anyway. There was a jaunty quality to his walk that just about broke her heart, because she knew what she was going to have to do.

Rather than risk him glancing back and spotting her, she turned off toward the main lobby and found herself walking past the library. Without really thinking about it, she went inside. She took a deep breath of books — she was always surprised that the air in the library never smelled even a little bit of cat pee — and was relieved not to see Freddy Larch anywhere.

Zelda walked down the stacks to the point where the natural light disappeared entirely. Her favorite cat, Moose, was curled up on the alchemy shelves, and Zelda stopped to whisper to him and scratch his neck. Moose lifted his black-and-white head but he didn’t open his eyes.

Zelda stopped herself from scratching him too long. Her curse wasn’t terribly discriminating about what was helpful or good; she wasn’t going to let Moose develop feline leukemia just because she made him purr.

She moved on, looking over the shelves of books on philters and unguents and incenses. Many of them were elementary-level stuff, and some were frankly quackery. Most of the rest she had been through, back to front, with mixed results. Newton’s Third Law meant that you didn’t get luck without side effects, and eczema was actually fairly mild compared to some of the things Zelda had managed to do to herself. Like the potion she had taken in June that made her body hair grow thick and luxurious. Luckily it had been during summer intercession, when she didn’t have to teach. Unluckily it had been during a stretch of ninety-degree days, and she had spent three of those days sprawled naked but furry on her kitchen floor, getting up every hour or so to shave her stomach. For weeks afterward she kept finding tufts of hair in hard-to-reach places.

In fact she had been terrified that Hector might find evidence of her brief life as a wolf-woman, but then again, she had been terrified of everything
that
night. At least, she was terrified once she sobered up enough to realize that she had brought him home, and that he was on her couch, and that clothes were starting to come off. She had been very close to throwing him out, but the apparent success of her luck lotion and the four glasses of malbec she’d had at the faculty reception had made her giddy. Zelda wasn’t beautiful in her own eyes — she was short and stocky, and she’d had a mustache since before she’d been cursed — but Hector told her she was, and Zelda had admired Hector from afar since he had first come to Gooseberry Bluff.

And now she was going to have to tell him that she could never see him again.

She picked out a few books — Barzak’s
Healing Powders to Smoke and Snort
, Rickert’s
Skin Magic
, and Samatar’s
Treatise on Alchemical Counter-Agents
. She was considering whether Rosenbaum’s
The Precision Principle: Seventeen Reasons your Potions aren’t Potent
was worth another look when something big and black slunk down the adjacent aisle of bookshelves.

Zelda gasped, but whatever it was had already passed out of sight. She inched to the end of the stack and glanced in the direction where it had gone, but there was nothing there, and only the smell of books in the air.

“Do you have a really big cousin living here, Moose?” Moose didn’t even glance at her, and after a moment Zelda gathered up the books she had picked out and carried them back to the circulation desk.

Freddy Larch was there, looking as if he had never left. His ridiculous outfit today was a camouflage blazer over a red T-shirt and pajama pants. Zelda spotted a cow with swollen udders jumping over a sleepy moon on them. “Good afternoon, Professor Akbulut,” he said.

“Afternoon.” Zelda set the books on the desk so he could scan them. She hesitated to say any more. Freddy was a terrible flirt — in every sense of the word “terrible.” He had hit on Zelda any number of times, and she had no reason not to think that he was hitting on students as well. Any attempt at conversation might be an opening, and so normally she tried her best to not engage with him. But this time her curiosity got the better of her.

“Mr. Larch, you don’t happen to have any…larger cats here in the library, do you? I mean really big cats. Like a panther?”

He gave her an oily smile. “A panther? In my library? How would such a creature get in here?”

Zelda opened her mouth to offer a guess, but changed her mind. “That’s a good question. Never mind. I’m just tired, I suppose.”

Joy Wilkins managed about four hours of sleep and a slice and a half of toast before she walked over to the campus. Her legs were stiff and she was struggling to focus. She had skipped her morning jog for the first time in…long enough that she couldn’t remember. Her sister always accused her of being addicted to exercise, and maybe it was true, but there were worse things.

It was a little after one when she made it into the office. One of the alchemy professors was having office hours, and there were three students crowded onto the pale-green couch, with another on the floor. Andy was wearing a cream-colored, sleeveless blouse with a ruffled front over a pair of houndstooth slacks. His heels clicked on the tile as he followed Joy to her office.

“Good afternoon,” Andy said, and handed her a couple of phone messages from students. “I wanted to let you know that I spoke to Edith about getting you in to see the president. She was
not
receptive.”

“Oh. I hope I didn’t get you in any trouble.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Edith is my aunt, actually. I started out here working as one of her student assistants.”

“I didn’t know you studied here.”

Andy laughed. Joy couldn’t stop studying Andy’s aura. Gender was something that tended to show up in auras as texture — lines for maleness, waves for femaleness. Andy’s aura was the most dynamic she’d ever seen in this respect: waves bisected by lines, lines oscillating into waves, waves collapsing into spheres and shimmering off like heat mirage. She had to focus to listen to what he was saying.

“I don’t know if I would call it studying,” Andy said. “You know, my grandmother was one of the people who founded this school.”

“Really?”

“Hilda Ruiz. She was a doctor of—”

“Recovery magic. Right. I’ve heard of her.”

“Yes. She was a very talented woman, but the sorcery gene is pretty much on or off in my family. You’re either a whiz or a washout. Edith and I are both washouts. I can’t even start a fire without a match.”